#363 – Advice From Someone Who Manages $250 Million in Amazon Revenue

Matt Altman from the Right Side Up will talk about his story, how he got started on the Amazon space, and how his agency manages brands that make over $250 million a year! He also shares his unique strategies about Amazon marketing, NFC hacks, Amazon attribution, influencer marketing, how to get more outside traffic for your listings, product research, product launches, PPC, and more!

In episode 363 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Matt discuss:

• 02:20 – Matt’s Story And Credentials
• 03:30 – Selling Books And Retail Arbitrage On Amazon
• 07:30 – Starting A Private-Label Brand
• 09:30 – Starting An Agency And Averaging $250 Million A Year On Ad Spend
• 10:30 – Matt’s Unique Amazon Strategies
• 11:30 – Promoting Amazon Products On Podcasts
• 15:00 – Helium 10’s Attribution Tool
• 16:30 – Launching Products Based On This Parameter
• 19:00 – Putting NFCs Behind Their Product Labels
• 22:00 – Make Sure That You’re Using Attribution
• 23:30 – Matt’s Launch Strategy For New Sellers
• 27:00 – Using SEM Rush To Find Google Search Keywords
• 23:30 – Matt’s Launch Strategy For Experienced Sellers
• 31:30 – Common PPC Mistakes That Matt Sees
• 34:30 – Matt’s Favorite Pacvue Features
• 36:00 – Matt’s Favorite Helium 10 Tools
• 37:00 – Matt’s Thirty-Second Tips
• 39:00 – How To Get In Touch With Matt Altman

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’ve got somebody on the show who manages over 250 million of yearly revenue on Amazon. He’s got tons of strategy, and golden nuggets. He’s gonna share today about product launch, keyword research, PPC, and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

You wanna know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon? To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords. The product is ranking for maybe at the top of page one, you can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10’s keyword research tool Cerebro. Now that’s just one of the many, many functions that make this tool, my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it’s the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for eCommerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro, h10.me/cerebro. Don’t forget to use the sir sellers podcast, discount coupon, SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. My name is Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon or Walmart world. And we’ve got a super serious seller here today. Like he does some ridiculous, ridiculous numbers here. He’s known to tell a joke or two every now and then, so he is not too serious, but Matt, welcome to the show. How’s it going?

Matt:

Good. Good. Thanks for having me.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now you just like blew everybody’s minds a few weeks ago at the Helium 10 elite workshop. We’re not gonna get like try and rehash that some of that stuff is behind the paywall there because it’s just too hot for podcasts here. But we’re definitely gonna talk about some advanced strategies that you use, but before we get into that, let’s set the stage here cuz you know, you’re not somebody who goes on every single podcast out there. It took me like a year to even book you on this, and we don’t see you on stage at every single event. Usually, you just do the high end mastermind out there. So there’s a lot of people who might not like, know your name, like a Kevin King or something. So let’s talk about your credentials, but I wanna take it before you even Amazon career. Like I know you’re in Colorado now, but were you born and raised in California?

Matt:

No, actually born and raised just outside of Columbus, Ohio.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. And then graduation of high school, did you go to the Ohio State, or did you stay around there or what?

Matt:

No, I was going to, but just too close to home, it was about 10, 15 minutes away, and needed to get a little bit further away. So went up north to Kent State. It’s about two and a half hours away from Columbus. And then after —

Bradley Sutton:

Kent State, yeah, there was a famous, I think the Antonio gates went to Kent state. I think a football player from the chargers went there. He was like a football or he was a basketball player at Kent State and then he changed the football anyways. I always little know random sports things about there. So what was your major over there?

Matt:

It was architecture actually, so I did architecture for three years and kind of realized I didn’t wanna design commercial buildings for the rest of my life. About three years in and ended up just majoring in accounting.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. And then did you actually get a degree in it?

Matt:

Oh yeah. Yep.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then did you get into that after graduation?

Matt:

So actually about my end of my sophomore year of college started noticing how much I could resell textbooks on Amazon for so started basically mass mailing all of my classes at the end of each semester that we would buy their books back for $5 over the spot price of the bookstore was, and everyone sold their books to us instantly and we turned around and flipped them. So went ahead and basically kind of parlay that out into multiple different universities, kind of in our tri-state region while I was in college and started applying to jobs when I graduated and I was like, man, I’m already making like three times what they’re offering me selling books on Amazon might as well figure out what this is.

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So you just started like a regular seller account and just putting them up as, as used and, and just making bank over these rich college kids.

Matt:

Exactly.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. So then at what point were you like, you know what I don’t want to just be flipping college books, you know, for the rest of my life. What else can Amazon do for me?

Matt:

Yeah, so it actually took a little bit of time for me. So I moved to California right after graduating settled in Manhattan beach in LA and basically got into retail arbitrage at scale. So had deals with local stores, like Big Lots, Targets, and Walmarts. And I would go in and buy out everything they had at the end of each quarter and did that for four to five years basically just made a pretty good living continued to do that and then started–

Bradley Sutton:

What were some of your peak sales during those four to five years? Like over the year, like your gross revenue, some people don’t understand how much potential there is in retail arbitrage back in the day. I mean, even still there there’s some potential, but back in the day, it was kind of crazy. I’m just curious what your numbers were.

Matt:

Yeah. back then, we used to be able to do about two and a half to three and a half million a year with just two people. There’s some serious volume in it. The big issue is  the margins are very tight because you’re always battling for the buy box. Other retail arbiters would get it from other targets or whatever, and then you’d lose all of your profits. So I mean, very, very thin. But yeah, made a great living for multiple years.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. So did you have a truck and then you just go and load it up or was this in like vans or how did you manage that?

Matt:

Yeah, so it was actually rented U-Haul so whenever we had a big enough load, we were renting, U-hauls, pick it up palletized and they would drop it right in the back for us.

Bradley Sutton:

And was this like cash or would you pay credit card?

Matt:

We were paying credit cards, so it was all going through the POS system at the local retailer’s store. So crazy credit card points. I’ve got millions and millions of miles still from that.

Bradley Sutton:

You didn’t have to like, stay in the regular line with like 17 shopping cards. So you had like a special checkout or something?

Matt:

Yeah. So the way that they would do it is they would basically, the manager would come and override it and they would bulk scan one thing and just override the entire order.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Is something like that doable today? Do you think like could I here in 2022 go to you know, there’s, there’s a big lot here. There’s a Burlington code factory. These different places. And like maybe, you know, see if I can negotiate some kind of deal like that with, or is this kind of like only viable back in the old days?

Matt:

No, it is definitely still viable. Like we, we just moved to Denver from Vegas a few months ago. Our entire garage was full of retail arbitrage stuff that I was still buying. Like, it never like gets outta your blood. You’re at target. You’re like, man, I can make 30 bucks on this. I’m gonna buy all 40 of ’em that they have. And off they go,

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. Did you ever get into like baseball cards and stuff? That was a big thing at Target for a while. And I tried to get into it, like I would have to go there, like on the day that it opens, but you could like buy, if you could get in on some of these things, you could get it like $25 and sell it for like 150 bucks, not on Amazon, but on eBay.

Matt:

So never got into baseball cards. My big one was actually limited edition Nintendo DSS and 3DSS. So they have like the Zelda edition ones, Mario. You could basically buy them. You could sell ’em instantly make a 30-40% margin on it. But if you held them for anywhere from a year and a half to two years, you could three to four X money.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow. All right. Now, did you ever go into your own private label? You know, obviously, I know, fast forward that you work for tons of brands out there. But what about for yourself?

Matt:

Yep. So after that kind of saw where that whole retail arbitrage was going, got out of it, still obviously dabble in it, but yeah went into some supplements and, and personal care products. I really didn’t want to compete with a lot of the Black hats, which there weren’t as many back then in supplements. I mean, there, there were still some, but we kind of went the route of patenting, a lot of our stuff. So we actually bought some patents from some people and redid their kind of older products and then relaunched them back on Amazon

Bradley Sutton:

Made in USA?

Matt:

Yep. Made in USA.

Bradley Sutton:

What year about was it when you first got into it?

Matt:

That would’ve been 2015.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So still early on in the Amazon game, you know, not even many tools if, if any, you know, around that time. And so 2015 to 2017, did you surpass ever your private label business on its own? Did it ever surpass that two or 3 million that you were doing before in retail arbitrage?

Matt:

No. So it never actually did until here recently. But the margins were just so much better and personal care, like our kind of model behind what I launch. We don’t want sexy products. We don’t wanna be the most search thing. I want items that will sell 20 to 30 units a day and I make 40 to 50% margins on ’em. So we look for ugly products like products that you’d be embarrassed to buy at Target. That’s what I wanna sell you online.

Bradley Sutton:

I love it. It’s a great product research tip right there. Then you don’t have to worry about fighting a bunch of Black Hattery out there. Okay. All right. So now, fast forward now we’re in 2022, like what do you do nowadays? And like, what’re some like crazy numbers that you can throw out of what you manage and stuff like that?

Matt:

Yeah. Yeah. So for the last four years we’ve been running an agency, so I lead our kind of Amazon e-commerce division at right side up, we focus on really anything, any type of paid performance, as well as like OTT podcast, really all advertising. But we do offer full service management from operations to ad spend to outside traffic, to launching like, whatever you need done. We do it on the Amazon side to date, we’re averaging about 250 million a year in managed ad spend. Our average account does anywhere from about 25 to 30 million a year work with a lot of big brands that you probably have in your house, as well as people that are just starting out and may have some PE funding and just trying to get things going.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. So obviously, you know, you know what you’re talking about, you’ve done it yourself. You do it for other people. So let, let’s start just talking about some strategies here. So what’s one of the unique things that you think that you do that maybe others might not know about or might not do much that that really helps you stay a step ahead of the competition because, you know you personally might pick unsexy products, but a lot of your clients, some of them have to compete in some of these sexy categories. So what are some things that you’re doing to kind of stay ahead of the stiff competition out there?

Matt:

Yeah. I would say that the biggest thing that we really do that, I mean, honestly, hasn’t really started happening for the last few or four, like five to six months, people have started to do this bit more, but outside traffic. So if you come to us and you’re going into a keto snack category like we’re engaging not only our Amazon team, we’re, we’re getting you podcast placements, we’re doing Google ads, we’re doing Facebook ads.

Bradley Sutton:

You know what, let’s go ahead and pause on that because you mentioned that about three minutes ago, and I, you could have mentioned it in that elite workshop, but, you know, I’m like that guy from 51st dates I forgot who, who ten second Tom, or whatever his name was, who would just forget things. So I might have missed it, but I, haven’t never heard of somebody talking about promoting Amazon products on podcasts. So, so can you talk a little bit about that strategy?

Matt:

Yeah. so we actually started doing this for the first time. About three years ago started on a dog treat brand company. Back when you could still technically kind of do a search, find, buys and everything was kosher we would run ads on podcasts send them to a landing page and basically give them their coupon code there and have them go search for the item on Amazon. Was very, very effective and way cheaper than actually running any other type of ad for us during that period podcast ads have gone up tremendously though, it’s gotten a lot more expensive. So we do focus on very specific podcasts that are very niche down to certain brands but still an amazing way to launch a lot of times too. Like what you’ll find is someone will search like Joe Rogan supplement, which that’s a huge search term on Amazon anyways, because of on it and everything else. And if you can get enough correlation between your product and that keyword, you’re gonna rank for every search term that starts with Joe Rogan.

Bradley Sutton:

Hmm. Okay. So obviously, you know, Lego, they use Helium 10 and Proctor & Hamble use, there’s some huge companies who can just throw ridiculous money at any, you know, they probably could advertise on Joe Rogan podcast. But, but, but the average seller, you know, obviously is not gonna try and go to Joe Rogan podcast though. So what are some number one ways to kind of look for a smaller podcast that’s relevant to your niche? And then, you know, I have no idea. Like how, how much would it cost, you know, like for, can you say like, oh, if they have this many listeners, you can count on a mention costing this much. Can you talk just a little bit about that kind of stuff?

Matt:

Yeah. So that’s definitely kind of where it’s a mystery. So we, we know a lot of the data because we’re, I think actually were the largest buyer of podcast media now as an agency in the US. So we have all the back data like what’s performing and how it works, but there is no way to really look for these databases outside of just manually searching and trying to find ones within your niche. We actually kind of stumbled upon podcasts in general. By accident, we were actually sponsoring YouTube videos for dog training for the original pet food company when we found it. And we found out about a month and a half in we just got this huge spike in traffic and couldn’t figure it out YouTube video wasn’t getting views. And they, they had published a podcast and actually talked about us on that.

Matt:

And that’s what took us down this whole route. So what we usually recommend for people with lower budgets is find those influencers on YouTube that are in your niche. And I mean, like, really, it doesn’t matter how many subscribers they have, as long as they’re getting 10 to 15,000 views on their videos. That’s what we look for. And then a lot of times you’ll find out people in these niches have their own podcast, they’ve got blogs, they’ve got everything else going on and they really don’t know they’re worth. So you can buy a lot of these people, very cheaply, or even just offer them a commission on the sales and may not even be any cost besides free product and that commission from what they can produce.

Bradley Sutton:

So then you could almost just say, Hey, like here’s a link and you make it an attribution link and say, you know, I’ll give you 15% commission on sales, knowing that you’re gonna get that 10% back from the what’s it called?

Matt:

Oh, the Brand Referral Bonus. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Brand Referral Bonus. And then, so you’re really only paying 5% commission. So like, that would be one of the strategies that you would use. And, and then is it kind of just like, Hey, this is kind of the honor system because you can’t really give somebody a link to the attribution. Like, I just, actually now I just thought of something, Helium 10 just came out with the attribution tool where we can create attribution. I just literally never thought about this until this conversation, but on certain levels of Helium 10 accounts, you could have subaccounts. And then, so I could make a subaccount for an influencer in Helium 10, and that give them only access to attribution. And then they could like, in real time, see the clicks and purchases or something. But anyway, I’m just thinking out loud here, but, but is that kind of like how you do it or?

Matt:

Yeah. So the way we do it a lot of them actually are very trusting and like we screen share live whenever we’re reporting back earnings, when we show them that, like, we’re not fudging the numbers in any way whatsoever. But we do short link them with like Bitly links or something along those lines. Doesn’t matter really what you use and you can create sub users on that, so they can at least see the clicks and the traction that it’s getting whenever they’d like. And then you share over the Amazon one, which it is off by like five to 15% give or take from what we’ve seen, but not off by too much.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. All right. So there’s one thing, you know, I don’t think we’ve ever talked about here on this podcast, is podcast advertising for Amazon products? Go ahead and continue from where you’re talking, some of the other unique things that you guys are doing.

Matt:

Yeah. really I think the bigger thing that we’re doing that I don’t see many people talk about on Amazon. As far as I know, there’s only one software out there that does this, but we launch everything based on LTV value and not actual, like what’s our cost per individual sale. So right off the bat, we do a lot of replenishable, like fast moving CPG products are bread and butter at our agency. But this works with everything that we’ve tried it on. If you’re thinking long term, instead of short term profits on Amazon, you’re always gonna come out ahead. And really the big thing is if you’re selling a supplement, for example, like on my own personal supplements, we’re willing to go three to four orders in the whole per acquisition, because we know our average customer buys about seven times once we get them. So we’re spending three to four X on the same terms that everyone else is, and you’re just gonna win.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. On all of these that, you know, can be putting continuity, you know the Amazon way of that is, is subscribe and save. Do you pretty much recommend like, Hey, if you’ve got a supplement if you’ve got a beauty product if you’ve got something to do with pets that needs to be replenished,10 times out of 10, always activate subscribe and save on your offer, or are there any cases where you’re like, nah, nah, don’t, don’t do subscribe and save?

Matt:

Nope. Always activate and always fund 10%. We even like we have some supplements and you may see this. If you’re searching where people like combine three or four bottles together, whatever, they’ll have a one bottle variation of two bottles, three bottles. We never do any of that because you actually want the individual sales volume through individual units. When you’re spliting that against ASINs like that, we don’t see, you get as much of a keyword lift as a whole on sales. So most of our supplements, we like the third or fourth image, it’s like buy two, save an extra 10% on top of the subscribe and save, buy three, save an extra 15%, and so on.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. That makes sense. Are you doing any kind of like inserts or things to kind of be able to start building a list with some of your customers that you’re doing? And then if so, what is your strategy? Is it like in your follow up where you say, Hey, thank you for purchasing this review, but also or maybe not asking for a review, but you’re saying, Hey, to activate your lifetime warranty, click this, or do you have an insert card that says that? Or I would imagine a supplement space or beauty space or a replenishable space. Like this is even more important than other niches.

Matt:

Yep. So we do it on everything. Any client that comes to us that doesn’t have it, we either redo their packaging or figure out some way to get an insert into it. A lot of them they may just be doing supplement bottles and like, we were really against throwing something on the outside of the packaging, like a QR code or anything like that. So for we actually just started doing this on a supplement company about a month ago, we’re putting NFCS behind the labels. So when you get your phone close to it automatically pops up with a link to click through

Bradley Sutton:

How would they know to do that though?

Matt:

So we have a thing that says, basically it’s a little image that says like, place your phone here. People at the Amazon warehouse, aren’t gonna be having their phones out. They take this as soon as you check in at Amazon. So it’s not something they’re gonna be looking for.

Bradley Sutton:

Aha. I like that. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. And then now, you’ve built up, do you wait until you get to a certain number before you start leveraging this? Or do you only leverage this list when you have a new product you wanna launch or how do you leverage this buyer list? And, and first of all, what’s like your, your, your percentage of, of how many people you actually get to opt into that?

Matt:

Yeah. recently it’s, it’s actually been dropping. We’re getting anywhere from like 12 to 15%. We used to get a pretty high rate, like 25 to 30, but we were offering like deep discounts on kind of that next order. Yeah. But what we’re doing, and this goes back to that LTV is we’re putting everyone that comes through, we’re obviously getting their order number when they go ahead and do whatever they’re doing from that insert. And we put it into our database. We’re then looking at that product, say you bought a green tea pill from us or whatever we’re looking at, what is the average reorder time period, window of someone who purchased that product. So for that one, we know it’s like day 27 through day 35, you’re gonna start getting emails or texts from us on day 27. And then we kind of follow more of a traditional e-commerce strategy where we’re using Gladio to message these people and keep that relationship going.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Are you sending them back to Amazon than to purchase or do you send them to Shopify or where do you send them to?

Matt:

Yeah, so this always actually comes up a lot with our clients. We always refer to Amazon, it’s a search arbitrage channel. It’s not gonna generate like four year brand. It’s not gonna really do anything beyond arbitrage. What’s already there. And we wanna obviously own the customer as much as possible. So once we do get an email address we go ahead and actually send them that first email and give them the option of either buying the item on our website or buying on Amazon, whatever they click in that first email. That is what they get tagged as in Claveo or whichever email provider we’re using at that point. And from that point forward, they only ever get Amazon directed emails. If they chose our site, they only get our own direct site. And that way we’re removing as much friction as possible.

Matt:

And I mean, we’ve AB tested this a lot. We’ve tried where we’ve only sent to the website for the first couple of emails and then switched to Amazon and really just giving them the choice at the beginning works extremely well. What we do is for most of our items, like when you get that email though, we’ll say like save percent on our website, save 30% on Amazon just to help incentivize that push over to our site. And honestly, like half the time they still end up on Amazon, even with a lesser coupon.

Bradley Sutton:

Hmm. Now, I don’t know too much about brand referral bonuses other than, you know, the basics, but like, what if in one of these emails, what if I put one of those attribution links? Will I get the brand referral bonus or that’s, this is only if the traffic actually comes from one of these approved social media channels?

Matt:

No. So you’ll still get the bonus.

Bradley Sutton:

So, do you give them attribution links then?

Matt:

We do. Yep. You have attribution links on everything.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s crazy. Why isn’t everybody doing this? I didn’t even know that, like, if you’re not using attribution, you’re leaving literally 10% on the table. Like, I thought it only had to be like coming from a certain, like a Google or Instagram or something like that.

Matt:

Yeah. We use it for everything. Like if we’re promoting blogs, anything like that, where they do expire though. So we, that’s why we always use a URL shorten so we can change them out and rotate them through or switch the product later on. But any influencer we’re using any YouTube video sponsoring, it’s all these types of links.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, guys, you heard it like, you know, I know a lot of you aren’t using it yet, but even the Platinum members have access to Amazon attribution now in Helium 10. So if you guys are doing follow up on your own with your customers, and you’re not giving them this link, you are literally leaving money on the table now. Let’s just talk about launch, you know, obviously, if you’re an established supplement brand and then you’ve got your big audience, you can do some marketing there when you launch, we’ll talk about that. But let’s first talk about like somebody as a new seller, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got a decent amount of money, you know, I’m not just someone, I only have a $5,000 budget for my first product and marketing kind of person, but, I wanna be able to make a splash. What is your current launch strategy now that you like, like you said last year or the year before I forgot when search find buy is against terms of service now, two step URLs, et cetera? What’s your launch strategy for a brand new to Amazon brands.

Matt:

Yep. So what we’re doing right now if you’re a hundred percent brand new, what we recommend, we’ve actually had a couple that we’ve had to do this on. We create a fake product and we sell it for a couple weeks. But what you want is that search query performance report. If no one, if you, aren’t using this, go to your brand, and please check it out because it gives you everything you’d ever wanna know about any keyword in the organic traffic and sales that it’s getting. So we use that data exclusively as well as data that we pull from Helium 10, kind of to overly, since we don’t know the ad sales that come through on that data. But what it allows you to do is you can basically figure out the units that anyone is moving because you can cross reference the search query performance reports, your brand analytics report for any keyword and know exactly how many units the top three you’re doing.

Matt:

So we work all of that backwards. And then, Hey, it’s next 10 to 15 days. We need to hit these sales goals for these keywords. You can do that in dozens of different ways. Right now the main way that we’re doing it is through Google ads with high clickable coupons on the items when we’re starting and running Amazon ads, specifically exact match campaigns and product targeting campaigns on basically the top three for all the keywords that we wanna go for. So we’ll go back and pull the brand analytics data weekly for our keyword list. And then we make sure that we’re targeting all of those three ASINs that appear in that brand analytics all the way back for the last year.

Bradley Sutton:

And are you running like Sponsored Display, Sponsored Brand, and Sponsored Product Ads all from day one? Or are you waiting a little bit at all?

Matt:

Yeah, so on day one, the only thing that we are launching is Sponsored Product Ads. We will basically run an Exact Match Campaign if there’s a ton of searches, like say you’re going after Keto snacks, keto snack gets ridiculous search volume. We’ll put that off in its own campaign. So that’s not stealing the volume from everything else from there, but usually, if they all get like around 10, 15,000 searches, you can throw five to 10 keywords in one campaign and not have any issues with that. And then we’re creating a second campaign that is also a Sponsored Product Campaign, but we’re targeting products, not keywords. And that’s where we’re dumping those in. We let that run usually for the entire launch. 25-30 days. We do not bring in any other type of ad until that period is over.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Okay. Now when going back to the Google ads are, are you doing Canonical URLs or how is your Google ads actually helping your Amazon EO?

Matt:

Yeah. So when you’re running Google ads, whatever keywords you’re running them for that obviously gets triggered over to Amazon. You’ll even, you’ll see it in the URL. So you’re getting basically a boost for those keywords. But I think the thing that we do that other people don’t do is you go straight from, Hey on helium 10 for the keto category, keto snacks is my number one keyword low carb snacks is my number two. Google search is not the same. Those aren’t gonna be the top search terms most of the time on Google because it’s not a buyer intent kind of search platform.

Bradley Sutton:

Makes sense.

Matt:

So we’re cross referencing through SCM rush. What we’re doing is we’re pulling the top three sellers for where we wanna be and taking their canonical URL, throwing it in Semrush, and seeing organically where their Amazon listing is for each of those keywords and then we’re pulling whatever those top traffic keywords are. That the number one search result is Amazon and we’re running our ads right above that. We’ve seen that it works better because usually it’ll be ad from Amazon, ad from us. And then the organic Amazon listing is all people will see and Google, and they’re gonna click one of those Amazon listings.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. And then, so basically you’re putting it just a regular attribution link in there, but the fact that they’re clicking that link from a Google search, Amazon is picking up on that original search term from Google.

Matt:

Yep.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. I see. Yeah, I didn’t realize that. And on the, now on the attribution link, if you are using a shortener for it are you still getting like the attribution and the key or let’s say in my personal experience, sometimes your Canonical, your regular Canonical URL, which is why I always suggest like, Hey guys, try and lock in your canonical, the five keywords or tell Amazon night, Hey, can you change my Canonical to this? Cuz because whenever I have big sales days, my keywords and my Canonical will increase. But if you’re using a shortener for your attribution link, will you still get the ranked juice from what your canonical has, or do you lose some of that?

Matt:

Yeah, so we don’t use shorteners when we’re running Google ads, but we have done it in the past. We don’t do it anymore. As long as you don’t check on whatever shortener you’re using to hide like the pixels and cookies, you’re fine with it. It will still transfer over but a lot of times some of those actually have that defaulted on and people don’t realize it.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So the key is if you’re using a shortener, don’t block the pixel. Yeah.

Matt:

Okay. If you’re used to using any of the Amazon ones, they all automatically block that because you don’t want, like, if you’re using some of the famous two step URL creators or things like that. They all block where it’s coming from.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Okay. All so I’ll have to make sure Helium 10 doesn’t doesn’t have that. We also have a, a shorten or two, because the reason why we did that was we can have stats like from day one, like in real time, like I think an attribution if you just do it there, you have to wait until 15 clicks or like a week or something like that to actually season data. But when we use the Helium 10 10 one, it’s like somebody clicks on it. I know that 10 seconds later, I’ll be able to see it on the dashboard. Okay. So, so that’s brand new to Amazon for launch. Let’s say, this is now my third or fourth product. I’ve got a list of customers. Do you take some effort then, and just focus on your existing list of people who are already proven to buy from your brand to launch?

Matt:

It depends. So I’d say on about half of them. We would send out very targeted emails. We use Claudio for all of our email marketing and you can segment out like crazy there. So we look and basically pull, who’s been buying on Amazon like if it is a supplement product, have they bought the last three to four months from me multiple times, and then we’ll slowly put them into different kind of nurturing campaigns that trigger every two to three days and slowly boost that out. We also have some triggers that we’ve set up in there where say Claudio actually integrates with Amazon directly pulls all your orders and things like that. Through if we haven’t hit a certain number of orders per day for that product, it’ll actually go ahead and send an email again, to like 20, 30 people and check every 15 minutes if the orders haven’t gotten up, it keeps sending those emails until we hit our daily quota. Because what we’ve seen is even if you aren’t getting your targeted sales per keyword per day, as long as you’re keeping that volume moving, even if there’s not a keyword behind that sale, even if it’s just a direct link to the canonical, you’re still gonna continue to move up the ranks. It’s really more about keeping your velocity up day over day versus making sure you get your sales per each keyword per day.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right. Now like you said, you onboard a lot of people who have, are already established on Amazon. So I’m just curious, when you take a look under the hood at maybe some of their PPC strategies, what’s some of the most common mistakes that you see. You’re like, oh man, I can’t believe these guys are doing this. You guys are leaving so much money or you guys are wasting so much money. Like what do you see as the common PPC mistakes that people new to you guys are doing?

Matt:

Yeah, I would say every large account. And these are accounts doing over 10-5 million a year. The biggest mistake is they’re not using negative match keywords ever. It doesn’t even matter if they had a large agency running it. Cuz what we’ve seen is most of these big brands like P&G, they have like agencies of record that they work with and you have to be one of those agencies of record or that brand manager can’t come and work with you. And it’s a very long process to kind of get that moving. So there’s a lot of legacy agencies that have this, that say they do Amazon ads or something and they have no idea what they’re doing. They’re just taking what works in Google and trying to bring it over to Amazon. So–

Bradley Sutton:

That’s shocking to me. Like it’s hard to believe that there are people out there who thinks you can get by without using, but we’re not even talking about newbies. We’re talking about established, 10 million companies are doing that crazy. What else?

Matt:

Yeah. the next biggest thing that we really see is no one’s using Sponsored Display. Everyone has a bad experience. Like I hated Sponsored Display up until about a year and a half ago, the changes that they’ve made in the targeting. And then even here recently, like, I mean it competes with DSP basically at this point. Wow. They’re I think they’re trying to make a self-served DSP channel, but for a lot of our clients, it’s actually the highest returning ad spend. We spend this on Sponsored Display.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I on one of our Weekly Buzz recently, we broke the–, we didn’t break the news. I mean, Amazon broke the news, but we mentioned how now, if I’m not mistaken on sponsor display, you can put a lifestyle image and like a logo like have you guys started playing around with this, this new stuff? And like, what’s your, what’s your strategy going to be there?

Matt:

Yeah. So we do a lot here actually. We actually use your partner company Pacvue theater to manage all of our ads for our agency. We’re split testing on all of our sponsor display four to five creatives per ad type. But what we’re doing that I think a lot of agencies are starting to catch up now and do this is we have very specific images and headlines for certain keywords. So if you’re in that Keto snack kind of category and you’re searching low carb, our image is gonna be something along the lines of low carb. Our call out is gonna be low carb. And then if you are searching keto snack, you’re never, ever gonna see those low carb callouts. We’re gonna go back to switching and using whatever plain keyword that you’re using. And basically, we have a team overseas that does this in bulk for us. So everything’s kind of laid out in the spreadsheet and they’re just matching headlines into images. Sometimes you can get away with putting that in. Sometimes it gets caught by Amazon flagged and they won’t let you do it. But the headline is always on target for that specific search term.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now you mentioned Pacvue. That’s one of the Helium 10 companies there. So like me, myself, I’m not actually too fam I’ve never used Pacvue for any of my accounts. I’m not, you know, I consider myself not big enough yet to need it, but so some other bigger customers out there, 7, 8, 9 figure sellers out there, like why would you suggest to them to use Pacvue? Like, I don’t know too much about the feature. So like what’s your favorite features of it?

Matt:

Yeah, I would say our biggest feature with Pacvue, they actually just release their Commerce Center, which is, I mean, kind of I think Helium 10 might have like cleaned them some data there because there’s definitely some mixing going on. It’s showing a lot of your organic sales just really anything that you wanna see about the product, about your competition and how it’s kind of running, but really the granularity that you can get with Pacvue, like all of our accounts run on custom rules that we’re setting up specific for each of those accounts. But the biggest one that we’ve actually been using here a lot is they have one where it’s basically searching impressions based on your organic rankings. So once we have an established product Pacvue you actually pulls the data on where you’re ranking organically for all of those keywords.

Matt:

I think it’s every hour, I’m not sure exactly, but if you’re ranking in the top three organically, we can pause out our ads. We can decrease our bids, 90%, whatever we wanna do while that top three is there. And then as soon as that top three rankings is gone organically, it’ll instantly turn our ads back on and we’re running again for that keyword. So we play a lot of that kind of flywheel where we’re riding it to get the rank up, and then we’re pulling it back, seeing how much organic sales we can get, and then writing it back up again and constantly kind of going up and down.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. What about for the average seller? What’s your favorite Helium 10 tool like, you’ve been probably using it for years minus Cerebro. Usually, I find Cerebro is for others too. How about you?

Matt:

Yep. Cerebro. We use Cerebro daily. Everyone on my team uses it nonstop. I think that the biggest thing that we use it for is we love Helium 10’s Keyword Tracker by far the best, usually the most accurate from what we’ve seen, but we actually pull Cerebro’s at least once a week. And we’re checking all of the, like top 20 items that go against our product because most people, I don’t think even look at this when you actually download the Cerebro report, it has everyone’s keyword ranking soft to the right hand side. So we plot that out and keep track of it to see if there are any movers or groupers in the category.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Okay. That’s a good strategy. Now, speaking of strategy, we do something on this show. We call the TST or 30-second tips. So you’ve been giving us strategies throughout this whole episode, but maybe you can give one or two that–, you don’t have to stick 30 seconds, but 30-second to minute, like some quick hitting things that you think can give some people some easy wins in Amazon.

Matt:

I would say probably our biggest thing here recently, and this is every client that we bring on. It’s something that we do as soon as we bring them on the first month, really optimize your image stack. So we pull everyone’s questions and answers, and we make sure if there are questions that are coming up on every competitor’s product, we answer that in our first two to three images, because I don’t know about you, but I only shop Amazon on mobile. I never scroll down to the bullet points or the A+ Content on mobile. I swipe the first three to four images. If it doesn’t say what I wanna see, I’m onto the next product. Doing that alone has doubled our conversion rate on a lot of products. So it doesn’t take much time to do Helium 10 actually scrapes it. That’s where we’re getting all the questions and answers from and super simple.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. All right. Now, what about a non Amazon tactic? Like, I don’t know if you, you help customers who, who wanna sell on Walmart. Do you have any Walmart strategies or Shopify strategies or something else?

Matt:

Yeah, so we do basically every marketplace at this point for Walmart’s it’s honestly kind of like where Amazon was six, seven years ago. You, you can get away with a lot of things that you can’t on Amazon, two step URL, still work perfectly fine. You can rank a product to the top of any page with just add to carts. You don’t actually even need purchases. But the biggest thing that I think people miss out on is Walmart will actually upload. If you’re a new seller, say you’ve been selling on Amazon or Shopify, your reviews to your product on Walmart all you have to do is open up a support case with their team and basically proof that the reviews are on your Shopify site and they’ll port them over. Most of our clients are like, well, we don’t have that many reviews on our Shopify site. So we use the Helium 10s extension to go ahead and scrape those reviews. And then we post them ourselves to our Shopify site, and then we get Walmart to syndicate them up to the products.

Bradley Sutton:

Super cool. Super cool. All right. Well, I really appreciate you coming on here. I’m sure people might have more questions or might even want to hit you up to check on how they can procure you for your services for them. How can they find you on the interwebs out there?

Matt:

Yeah. so they can go to rightsetup.com. They can email me directly at [email protected] or [email protected].

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right, Matt, thank you so much for joining us, and hope to see you again soon.

Matt:

Sounds good. We’ll see you.

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